Posted
by
samzenpuson Sunday March 30, 2014 @01:33PM
from the sleep-or-die dept.

jones_supa (887896) writes "Switching over to daylight saving time, and hence losing one hour of sleep, raised the risk of having a heart attack the following Monday by 25 percent, compared to other Mondays during the year, according to a new U.S. study released on Saturday. By contrast, heart attack risk fell 21 percent later in the year, on the Tuesday after the clock was returned to standard time, and people got the extra hour of sleep. The not-so-subtle impact of moving the clock forward and backward was seen in a comparison of hospital admissions from a database of non-federal Michigan hospitals. It examined admissions before the start of daylight saving time and the Monday immediately after, for four consecutive years. Researchers cited limitations to the study, noting it was restricted to one state and heart attacks that required artery-opening procedures, such as stents."

You're probably right; however, you only getting a few hours of sleep some night and slightly increasing your chances of having a heart attack the next day will be completely lost in the noise. Daylight savings time on the other hand is the one time when almost the entire population gets short-shifted on sleep simultaneously, allowing a moderate 25% increases in a tiny risk factor (having a heart attack *today*) to be observed.

Yes, and the problem with this analysis is that these folks were probably ** going ** to have a heart attack soon - perhaps next week, this is just one big jolt that, as you note, happens at the same time so pops up out of the noise.

Even if you let everybody sleep on the same scale, you're not really going to change the rate of MI's all that much by killing DST. If you let Americans sleep MORE on the average, then you might see the rate drop. But then they would live longer and cost more, so you don't nec

When the time change goes the other direction, people aren't forced to adjust to it instantly, and they don't. You don't immediately get an extra hour of sleep. Most people will still wake up at the original time or close to it on their own.

Tell me about it. I took a holiday to find out my "natural" clock. It's closer to a 28 hour cycle than a 24 hour one. In other words, I'm constantly sleepy and unable to fall asleep if pressed into a 24 hour cycle.

One hour give or take is pretty much moot to me, but it may give people an idea what life is like for me ALL the time, not just when an hour gets "taken" from me.

When I was in college, I saved money renting a closet for a bedroom (not sure what a legal definition of "bedroom" is, but the room was large enough for a bed, and contained no closet, and no windows). With no windows, and on a college student's schedule, I dropped into a routine well beyond 24 hours, and it screwed with my mind something fierce.

I think it'd be interesting to have people cut off from all sense of time and see where the natural rhythms lay.

I cordially invite you to come and live in the wonderful Kingdom of Sweden for a few years and see just what it's like what to bob back and forth between 18-hour days in summer and 6-hour days in winter.

*Especially* if your natural clock is already a bit off from the 24-hour norm, like Opportunist's--and mine.

I've heard it, too. There are references in literature to "the second sleep" which faded away in recent centuries. That second sleep being after people had their first sleep, then spent some time awake in the dark doing whatever, and then went back to bed to finish off the night.

Why not go to bed at the same solar time and wake up at the same solar time? This involves waking up earlier than you need to on work days during standard time. But so what? During daylight savings time, spend an hour in the morning in a cafe drinking coffee and reading a novel.

Years ago that would mark you as a weirdo because you couldn't stay up and watch some hot TV show that starts at 10PM, but people aren't slaves to the broadcast TV schedule any longer, so why not do things on your own schedule?

I'm by nature a night owl, but staying up is no big deal for me. Getting up early is a lot more rewarding; everything you like about being up abnormally late is true of being up abnormally early.

For one it doesn't work if you're on corporate time. I spent a couple years in a windowless office, and let me tell you winters sucked - I only worked 8-5, but for a couple months near the solstice dawn was just breaking when I left for work, and the sun was setting about the time I left for home. Lunchtime was the only sun I got to see, and that's at at 35.6N latitude, most of the nation is further north and has it even worse.

These days I am in fact operating mostly on solar time, but daylight savings still meant that 8am went from being an hour or so after sunrise, to having it still hanging on the horizon with only the lit sky providing light. If you presume you need a 30-60 minutes for your morning rituals and getting to work, that means for a few weeks after DST you need to be waking up while it's still dark out, and after you were finally getting to see some sun in the morning too.

For one it doesn't work if you're on corporate time. I spent a couple years in a windowless office, and let me tell you winters sucked - I only worked 8-5, but for a couple months near the solstice dawn was just breaking when I left for work, and the sun was setting about the time I left for home. Lunchtime was the only sun I got to see, and that's at at 35.6N latitude, most of the nation is further north and has it even worse.

I'm at approx 56N, I awake at 4:00am UTC (+/- 1 minute) every frigging morning as I have done so for a couple of decades now irrespective of whatever the clocks say (only time I don't is when I'm Ill). An asides, there's a wonderful paradox at work here, I get to wake up the cats rather than the usual order of things...

I head to work at 6:30am, leave work at any time between 17:30-18:30, current sunrise/sunset times are 07:11/17:53 here, so occasionally I get to see some spectacular sunrises (weather perm

It may be hard to change your habits that quickly, but that's just a cultural thing. Humans, along with every other plant and animal on the planet have been dealing with strictly solar time, with its rapid seasonal changes, for hundreds of millions of years - by this point I suspect our biologies have it mostly figured out, though if you come from more equatorial stock the natives who have an extra few thousand years of evolution adapting them to those near-arctic extremes may have an easier time of it.

I'm suggesting you keep time according to the solar hour angle (e.g. the angle between a great circle intersecting the sun and both poles, and the celestial meridian which passes through your local zenith). I'm not recommending you keep time according to the elevation of the Sun relative to the local horizon.

In a nutshell: if possible, contrive your schedule so you can act as if nothing is changing. Don't get up earlier because the sun rises earlier, or because we're changing from daylight savings to stan

Sure it works for people on corporate time. Your problem with not seeing the Sun is caused by your *work* schedule, not your *sleep* schedule (not to mention your lousy office).

I've actually been in the same position, working in a windowless lab with no wall clock. This was in the days before computers didn't have battery backed up clocks and boot roms. I'd come into work, load the bootstrap program in through the front panel switches and if I didn't have a watch on I'd work until I was done with what fel

My mistake, as your reply to ColdWetDog points out you're talking about mean solar time, whereas I was considering traditional apparent solar time where a "day" is defined by dawn-to-dusk and hence varies in length over the course of the year.

For MST you have a different problem - if you need an hour in the morning to get to work at 8am DST then that means year-round you need to get up at 7am DST = 6am MST, which means all winter you're waking up an hour early for no good reason, and presumably spending co

Here's an even better solution: stop making people wake up an hour earlier because they have to get to their jobs that suddenly begin an hour earlier for no particular reason.

The only plausible reason for having DST in the modern world is so that people can get up with the dawn to go to their jobs. But with it beginning so early in the year, on the first day of DST most people have to get up before the dawn, which is just awful. I don't have any hard evidence to back up this idea, but I bet if you moved the

The only plausible reason for having DST in the modern world is so that people can get up with the dawn to go to their jobs. But with it beginning so early in the year, on the first day of DST most people have to get up before the dawn, which is just awful. I don't have any hard evidence to back up this idea, but I bet if you moved the DST start date to the end of April (and the end date to the end of August) there would be a lot fewer heart attacks and a lot less complaining.

Better yet -- DST all the time. No time switches. Standard time sucks.

Tell me how. No matter how hard I try or how long I stay in bed, I am totally unable to sleep until 15-16 hours have elapsed after waking up. And if I manage to fall asleep, I'll be wide awake but tired as hell after 2-3 hours tops.

Sleep is not the same for every person. It varies wildly from individual to individual. That's why people always shuns sleep disorders as some form of misconduct instead of a legitimate problem (until they gain a sleep disorder themselves, if that happens they'll suddenly underst

Sure, having 300 million people go to sleep an hour earlier is MUCH simpler than just not having the same number of people adjusting clocks twice a year, and all the IT infrastructure associated with same.

I think it's heaps simpler not to fuck with the clocks, and to let people make their own decisions about bedtimes.

The problem with "let people make their own decisions" is that it's rarely your own decision. I work 9:00 - 17:30, not because those are the hours I want to work, but because they are the hours that most people work and my customers expect me to be contactable during "normal office hours".

That's because people punt the problem to Monday rather than adjusting over the time provided.

The time change occurs on Sunday morning at 2am... so thats one wake up between when the change happens and Monday. If you start prepping before the time change you still only get... 2 wake ups to 'adjust'

Its rather stupid to pretend that one or 2 days is a great difference in the process.

Pretending that people actually have enough time to do so is dishonest at best.

Surely this isn't linked to the time people go to bed and rise, but the amount of sleep they get.So to reduce the risk of a heart attack, just get more sleep

The is how "morning people" have been misunderstanding "night owls" for centuries. Here's why you're wrong: I cannot go to sleep on demand. I can wake up on demand, thanks to my alarm clock, I can stay up later than my body wants me to, but I cannot make my body go to sleep any earlier than it wants to (without addictive drugs).

So, yes, if you fuck with the clocks like an inconsiderate fucking fucker, I'll lose an hour of sleep. Nothing I can do about it. And since it takes me a few days to adjust to getting up 1 hour earlier (the norm is only 1 day per hour), I miss an hour's sleep for a few days after the clock change.

I pretty much can fall asleep when I like, within boundaries. Normally it's off to bed at 2300, awake at 0700. But I can go to bed tonight at 2100, knowing I'll fall asleep in no more than 30 minutes and my body will wake me up at 0530.

But then except for a trains and planes, I haven't used an alarm clock in over 5 years.

Yes please, I will have it with milk before I lay my head down for unclouded dreams of delight.

95% of all food/environment-related health research misses the elephant in the room; the hard to quantify effects of personal stress. This study shows that stress, by variation to routine, kills people. My remarks were there to illustrate that sleep cycles driven by routine are unnatural because we make them so.

It's always galling when the media focus on rich, busy people, on how stressful their lives are, It's the poor bastards at the bottom who are most stressed and have the worst health outcomes. Any research that draws attention to this is to be welcomed.

I took my time during a holiday to test myself. I blocked out any sunlight, wrote a tool that allows me to do a time stamp when I wake up and when I go to bed (i.e. when I'm tired) and took away any and all abilities I could possibly have to tell the time so I cannot be influenced by what "should" be my cycle.

The result was that, if given the chance, I live on a rather stable 28 hour "day" cycle (with a difference of less than 30 minutes per 28 hou

Lucky you. I cannot even fall asleep "on time" when it's not the "fuck with the clock" time of the year. My body is on a 28 hour rhythm. Nothing I do can change that (and trust me on that one, I tried!).

I'm already short 4 hours of sleep every day already. Shifting another hour in doesn't really improve that ratio.

Perhaps we could instead change DST to kick in Friday evening instead, then most people at least have a couple mornings for their schedule to adapt gently before they have that Monday-morning alarm forcing them into compliance.

So, yes, if you fuck with the clocks like an inconsiderate fucking fucker, I'll lose an hour of sleep.

Yes, but what you fail to understand is that people have to go to work, and the times of day and night shift over the year. It's not like businesses could just adopt "winter hours" and "summer hours" - everybody must upset their entire day to accommodate it.

Well, except for Home Depot, Walmart, all the parks, and all those businesses that do have different summer hours. But nobody else could possibly do that - it would be pure anarchy. I mean, children wouldn't even get to go to sleep while it's till light out in June if we did something crazy like keep the clocks the same all year!

Dozens of lives lost to heart attacks (and the few billion in admin time) is a small price to pay for the soothing hand of Congress regulating our clocks twice a year.

When the onset of DST ("daylight deposit day") was stable, that was one thing, but now congress feels the need to change it just to show the people who's boss. Now it's a wonderful surprise of a Sunday morning.

Surely this isn't linked to the time people go to bed and rise, but the amount of sleep they get.

So to reduce the risk of a heart attack, just get more sleep.

It seems likely to me that the people who had heart attacks after having an hour less sleep were probably going to have a heart attack *anyway* and the shorter night just stressed their body enough to make it happen marginally sooner. So if the clocks hadn't changed, maybe they would've only lasted a couple of days longer.

Similarly, the people who didn't have a heart attack on the day when they got an hour more sleep may well go on to have their heart attack a few days later.

> It could also be because they sit on their butts all day and eat lots of junk food.

Most long-haul and delivery truckers also help load and unload the trucks, and that requires intense activity scattered at add times throughout a day. The older truckers have also learned to protect their bodies and their diets: they use the safety equipment, the gloves and kidney belts, and they eat well. Or they'd have never lasted long enough in the business to be older truckers.

>Little wonder there are so many truckers having heart attacks that end their careers (or even their lives)!I suspect the sedentary lifestyle and diet rich in fat- and cholesterol-rich fast foods is a bigger contributor.

But you have a point about swing shifts, I seem to remember reading about a study recently that suggested that swing shifts did in fact have a number of negative health effects.

Yes. If we're going to ban DST, there's a lot of other things that will have to go. Like moving work shifts. The courts will have to adjust as well. No more jury duty for night owls unless they open a night court.

Not sure what it's like where you live, but the trucking industry in Australia is ruled by unachievable deadlines, low salaries, and life critical bonus payments made for early delivery.

The truckers down here died disproportionately from heart attacks not due to their sleep cycle but due to an incredible reliance on stimulating hard drugs, usually speed and ice causing a lack of sleep altogether.

Since World War II, it has been mostly about saving energy. In the US, FDR made it mandatory under the name "War Time." Early uses go back to World War I, before school buses were in common use. It's not about children or crime.

I've heard that story as well, the only problem is it's nonsense. It would imply that we were changing the clocks when it's dark in the morning - i.e. in the winter, while the reality is that DST changes things during the summer, when it gets light early. In fact for the first few weeks of DST that pre-8am bus wait goes from having been in the sun for several weeks to once again standing around in the pre-dawn darkness.

The kids going to school in the dark issue is the reason that we don't have DST all year around.

youth crimes are largely committed between 3PM and 5PM.

According to this graph [statcan.gc.ca] the peak is between 3-6PM on weekdays but it is not much different than any other segment between noon and midnight. From the graph approximately 73 youths were accused between noon and midnight. Of that, 21 (29%) occurred between 3 and 6. That is 4% over the expected average of 25%. Sorry but a 4% difference is not largely.

Proof that sunlight is Evil! Return to your basements and bunkers fellow geeks. Avoid any light not produced by our shining monitors, as it is a lie. Hazard the light from the Sun and you will be burned! What other proof do you need? Only in our computer generated worlds do we find Truth.

It sits on the "trailing edge" of its time zone. The clocks are out of kilter with the sun, by almost two hours during DST. Time zone borders should be moved to the white areas between the red and green of this graphic [wp.com] and then kill DST. Solar noon should never happen before the clock strikes 12.

It sits on the "trailing edge" of its time zone. The clocks are out of kilter with the sun, by almost two hours during DST. Time zone borders should be moved to the white areas between the red and green of this graphic [wp.com] and then kill DST. Solar noon should never happen before the clock strikes 12.

Boston is on the leading edge of it's time zone. I always look forward to DST. If we didn't change the time the sun would come up at 4:30 am here and go down at 7:30 pm during the summer. I'm a night owl and the sun coming up that early would kill me plus it wouldn't leave much time for summer evening activities during week nights. Boston really should be on the Atlantic time zone, but that wouldn't go over well with business because of ties to the NY stock markets, etc.

So they noticed that the monday after the switch, they had 8 more heart-attack patients than on a regular monday.
Don't know if these are averages, but it just means they see 25% more patients.
It doesn't mean that everyone has 25% more chance of having an heart-attack that particular day.

So we could see if they compared to Arizona — which mostly doesn't follow DST. For for that matter to dairy farmers who also don't follow DST in their sleep schedule. From TFA it seems like the data only comes from the state of Michigan in what I believe is one year only.

This study is interesting but there is no where near enough data to draw any real conclusions... not that that will stop anyone...

Right so people should only do meta studies? Then who would do actual studies? We can't all just believe that Big Data will get us everywhere. This is another study. The comments on slashdot are perfectly justified given that this study shows results which are in line from other similar studies performed else where at different times.

Just because we're commenting on one study doesn't suddenly invalidate everything.

For instance, the clock changes on Saturday night (Sunday morning to be exact), As such, there is no loss of sleep on Sunday night for the heart attack on Monday. Even more perplexing, is the drop in heart attack doesn't occur until the following Tuesday, even though again the clock change is Saturday night.

This would be easy enough to verify, take any other night, when one traditionally looses sleep, say New Year's Eve. Is there a rise in he

Went looking for the original paper to see how many cases were looked at. Dr. Sandhu doesn't show up in a search for UC at Denver so no luck there. A few news article referenced a Conference which points to http://www.medpagetoday.com/Me... [medpagetoday.com].

That page says that the # of extra attacks is 8. Moreover, Dr. Sandhu is quoted as saying that the total number of heart attacks in the week leading up to and following the clock change is unchanged so if there is an effect at all, it's front-loading the week's expecte

A fair point in terms of DST - though the fact that the increase immediately after DST begins is larger than the decrease after it ends would at least naively suggest that DST may be responsible for a slight net increase in heart attacks.

For Christmas though - considering the social obligation many people feel to give gifts, and the number of "crap" gifts that are given and never get returned (including the huge amount of Christmas-themed stuff that may be kept, but only used for a few weeks a year, and whi

I would think an even dispersal of heart attacks would be preferable to spiking them on one day due to hospital resources. Plus, causing heart attacks to happen sooner than they would have is also bad. If it happens six months earlier than it would have otherwise, that's six months a patient might have been able to mitigate those risk factors.

With so many people running off smartphones and computers rather than watches, I feel like we could probably soon manage to move away from a on/off switch. Have

Do we even have any evidence that it actually increases economic activity? I know that was the common sense rationale when it was established - but common sense is often wrong when applied to complicated systems. Is there a clear increase when DST kicks in, and corresponding decrease when it ends? Have we done in-depth statistical cross-comparisons between seasonal economic fluctuations between locales that do and do not practice DST? Has anyone even bothered to look?

No, not overall economic activity, consumer activity. People go shopping more because daylight is longer. That much is proven, and retailers love DST because of it. Not sure about the overall economic effect. Wouldn't be surprised if it was a net zero.

Fine, call it consumer activity (being a subset, any change in consumer activity will have a corresponding change in economic activity, unless there's some secondary effect that neutralizes the change).

So - can you cite an actual scientific study that backs up the common-sense claims you just made? Preferably several independent studies?

If the change is real though, how would it be a net zero? Perhaps compared to a world where clocks were offset by 1/2 hour year round, but IIRC DST didn't involve adjusting

Yes, hopefully by this point we all know that the touted "energy savings" of DST are complete BS. There've certainly been enough independent studies in the last century all reaching the same conclusion. But what does that have to do with the conversation at hand, which is about (presumably) unrelated consumer behavior?

DST doesn't change the amount of daylight. The earth's orbit and axial tilt change the amount of daylight.

If the problem is that businesses do better when there are more daylight hours after people finish work, that could be solved without having a DST at all - just provide an incentive for employers to change hours or offer flex time to employees.

In fact, I think we would do far more for the economy and the environment by encouraging businesses to stagger hours such that there is no more "rush hour." The

Well, here in Western Australia the sun is shining at 4:30 in the morning in the summer. This means all the birds, dogs and retarded morning people up and waking the dead at 4-fucking-30. The Sun goes down around 7:30 PM.

We had daylight savings for 3 glorious years until the backwards idiots in this state repealed it. DST shifted the sunrise to 5:30 and sunset to 8:30... this had the added bonus of allowing you to do things that required daylight after work.